The killing of Botham Jean is a devastating and senseless tragedy

“The number one answer that I want is, ‘What happened?’” Allison Jean said on Monday, several days after her son Botham Shem Jean was shot and killed in his apartment by a Dallas Police Officer Amber Guyger.

“I have asked too many questions, and I have been told that there are no answers yet,” she continued.

The basic facts of her son’s death are hard to wrap one’s mind around, even though we’ve all heard of far too many similar tragedies.

Botham, 26, was a beloved young man, originally from St. Lucia, who joined PricewaterHouse Coopers as a risk insurance associate in the firm’s Dallas office in 2016, after graduating from college in Arkansas. His life was a happy one, with a clear sense of purpose, until it was abruptly extinguished by a violent crime—committed by a law enforcement officer for no apparent reason.

Guyger was arrested, and charged with manslaughter after an investigation by the Texas Rangers. A grand jury may decide to charge her with murder. Legal experts have argued that the latter charge would make more sense. By Guyger’s own account, she intended to shoot Jean — in other words, his death was a mistake rather than an accident. She told the Texas Rangers she thought she had encountered a burglar, after coming home from work following a long shift that ended late at night. Only later did she realize she had shot one of her neighbors, that she’d entered his unit instead of hers in their apartment complex.

But Guyger, clearly, is not necessarily a reliable witness. She is a white law enforcement officer who shot and killed an unarmed black man who had done nothing wrong and who was, at the time of the incident, literally minding his own business in the privacy of his own home.

So the question asked by his mother is the right one: What happened?

I spent some time this week trying to imagine myself in Guyger’s shoes, because what she did strikes me as inexplicable. I can imagine trying to enter the wrong apartment, after a long day at work. I’ve occasionally done that at hotels. And if Jean’s door was ajar, as Guyger claims, she might not have realized her mistake right away.

But I cannot understand Guyger why would have confronted Jean as she did. She said she thought she was confronting a burglar, but she was in the entryway of the apartment and could have just retreated and called for backup. Such a confrontation would necessarily put her own life at risk, as well as his. Law enforcement officers are used to taking such risks. And under Texas law, we all have the right — as a matter of self-defense or to protect our property — to use deadly force against trespassers, if we have reason to believe it’s necessary.

With that said, we’re not obligated to use deadly force if confronted by an intruder. Nor are we obligated to confront intruders in the first place. And I personally would be reluctant to provoke such a confrontation, if I had the option of retreating, as Guyger did in this case. There’s no shame in that, surely, even if this is Texas.

Police officers are trained to override certain instincts including a fear for personal safety. That may help explain why Guyger responded as she did after encountering Jean. But what happened as a result was a devastating and senseless tragedy which should spur all of us to self-reflection.

Guyger may not have realized her error until the person who paid the price for it was dying, but Jean was her neighbor, not an intruder. And he would still be alive if she had responded proportionately to the threat she imagined him to be.

Erica Grieder joined the Houston Chronicle, as a metro columnist, in 2017. Prior to that she spent ten years based in Austin, reporting on politics and economics, as the southwest correspondent for The Economist, from 2007-2012, then as a senior editor at Texas Monthly, from 2012-2016. In 2013, she published her first book, "Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas." An Air Force brat, Erica thinks of San Antonio as home. She is a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas's Emerging Leaders Council, and holds degrees from the University of Texas at Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs and Columbia University, where she majored in philosophy.